Month: November 2008

Apparently this opera summary was published the day after the US presidential election here. I first saw it in a email message from Phil Jones. More comments and discussion here at DailyKos. Thanks to Ellen Peters for finding the DailyKos post.

Read and laugh! The more into opera you are, the funnier it is. Now, how often can you say that last sentence?

I’ve been wondering why they are not since my first semester’s statistics class in my PhD program in Rochester with Dale Poirier. This, due to Mark Thoma, gives a nice, quick push in that direction. Hat tip to marginalrevolution.com for the link.

I owe this link to Barry Reich who posted it on Facebook. It’s a short article by a physicist that lays out the argument that the Large Hadron Collider will not create an Earth-swallowing black hole. The most convincing part for me: cosmic rays have been creating collisions as strong as the LHC would, and we’re still here.

While taking a break from the seemingly endless wading through application files that I am doing by necessity, I found this interesting report about rats versus Yale undergraduates via a post of Tim O’Reilly on Twitter that ended up on Friendfeed. Faced with a random sequence of rewards for choosing one of two possible courses of actions, the rats behaved optimally; the undergraduates thought too much about the random sequence and ended up attaching fake patterns to it that resulted in substantially less success than the rats’ in getting the rewards.

I keep repeating the old adage “I predict not because I can, but because I am asked to”, which comes from an economist whose name I am now unable to recall. Now I can add to this that rats do better, so please don’t ask me to predict such things as the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

I hope you find it as interesting and enjoyable as I did. It would be a good thing if the Republicans got some brains back, as it advocates. It would be good for the world, for the United States, and for the Republicans themselves.

Ship of fools

Nov 13th 2008
From The Economist print edition

Political parties die from the head down

Illustration by KAL

JOHN STUART MILL once dismissed the British Conservative Party as the stupid party. Today the Conservative Party is run by Oxford-educated high-fliers who have been busy reinventing conservatism for a new era. As Lexington sees it, the title of the “stupid party” now belongs to the Tories’ transatlantic cousins, the Republicans.

There are any number of reasons for the Republican Party’s defeat on November 4th. But high on the list is the fact that the party lost the battle for brains. Barack Obama won college graduates by two points, a group that George Bush won by six points four years ago. He won voters with postgraduate degrees by 18 points. And he won voters with a household income of more than $200,000—many of whom will get thumped by his tax increases—by six points. John McCain did best among uneducated voters in Appalachia and the South.

The Republicans lost the battle of ideas even more comprehensively than they lost the battle for educated votes, marching into the election armed with nothing more than slogans. Energy? Just drill, baby, drill. Global warming? Crack a joke about Ozone Al. Immigration? Send the bums home. Torture and Guantánamo? Wear a T-shirt saying you would rather be water-boarding. Ha ha. During the primary debates, three out of ten Republican candidates admitted that they did not believe in evolution.

The Republican Party’s divorce from the intelligentsia has been a while in the making. The born-again Mr Bush preferred listening to his “heart” rather than his “head”. He also filled the government with incompetent toadies like Michael “heck-of-a-job” Brown, who bungled the response to Hurricane Katrina. Mr McCain, once the chattering classes’ favourite Republican, refused to grapple with the intricacies of the financial meltdown, preferring instead to look for cartoonish villains. And in a desperate attempt to serve boob bait to Bubba, he appointed Sarah Palin to his ticket, a woman who took five years to get a degree in journalism, and who was apparently unaware of some of the most rudimentary facts about international politics.

Republicanism’s anti-intellectual turn is devastating for its future. The party’s electoral success from 1980 onwards was driven by its ability to link brains with brawn. The conservative intelligentsia not only helped to craft a message that resonated with working-class Democrats, a message that emphasised entrepreneurialism, law and order, and American pride. It also provided the party with a sweeping policy agenda. The party’s loss of brains leaves it rudderless, without a compelling agenda.

This is happening at a time when the American population is becoming more educated. More than a quarter of Americans now have university degrees. Twenty per cent of households earn more than $100,000 a year, up from 16% in 1996. Mark Penn, a Democratic pollster, notes that 69% call themselves “professionals”. McKinsey, a management consultancy, argues that the number of jobs requiring “tacit” intellectual skills has increased three times as fast as employment in general. The Republican Party’s current “redneck strategy” will leave it appealing to a shrinking and backward-looking portion of the electorate.

Why is this happening? One reason is that conservative brawn has lost patience with brains of all kinds, conservative or liberal. Many conservatives—particularly lower-income ones—are consumed with elemental fury about everything from immigration to liberal do-gooders. They take their opinions from talk-radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and the deeply unsubtle Sean Hannity. And they regard Mrs Palin’s apparent ignorance not as a problem but as a badge of honour.

Another reason is the degeneracy of the conservative intelligentsia itself, a modern-day version of the 1970s liberals it arose to do battle with: trapped in an ideological cocoon, defined by its outer fringes, ruled by dynasties and incapable of adjusting to a changed world. The movement has little to say about today’s pressing problems, such as global warming and the debacle in Iraq, and expends too much of its energy on xenophobia, homophobia and opposing stem-cell research.

Conservative intellectuals are also engaged in their own version of what Julian Benda dubbed la trahison des clercs, the treason of the learned. They have fallen into constructing cartoon images of “real Americans”, with their “volkish” wisdom and charming habit of dropping their “g”s. Mrs Palin was invented as a national political force by Beltway journalists from the Weekly Standard and the National Review who met her when they were on luxury cruises around Alaska, and then noisily championed her cause.

How likely is it that the Republican Party will come to its senses? There are glimmers of hope. Business conservatives worry that the party has lost the business vote. Moderates complain that the Republicans are becoming the party of “white-trash pride”. Anonymous McCain aides complain that Mrs Palin was a campaign-destroying “whack job”. One of the most encouraging signs is the support for giving the chairmanship of the Republican Party to John Sununu, a sensible and clever man who has the added advantage of coming from the north-east (he lost his New Hampshire Senate seat on November 4th).

But the odds in favour of an imminent renaissance look long. Many conservatives continue to think they lost because they were not conservative or populist enough—Mr McCain, after all, was an amnesty-loving green who refused to make an issue out of Mr Obama’s associations with Jeremiah Wright. Richard Weaver, one of the founders of modern conservatism, once wrote a book entitled “Ideas have Consequences”; unfortunately, too many Republicans are still refusing to acknowledge that idiocy has consequences, too.

rating: 3 of 5 stars
It is funny that after a long period of reading (apart from work reading) only non-fiction, I felt the need to go back to fantasy, of all genres. Anathem had this effect.

I have read American Gods by Gaiman, and I liked his ability to build fantasy worlds. In Neverwhere this ability is in evidence again. The book paints a vivid image of an alternative London, under the cracks of the streets of the real London. To some extent, it reminded me of Terry Pratchett’s version of London (he calls it something else). The ordinary protagonist of Neverwhere tries to help a bleeding woman and ends up having a fantastical adventure underground.

Characters are painted very well, and the story moves forward irresistibly, with the right amount of humor to counterbalance the darkness of the main theme. I finished it in one day. It left me with some mind pictures that will endure for quite a while, but not with any strong admiration for Gaiman’s use of language.